


Druxy

by deathwailart



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Loss of Faith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:19:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy Stillman: how it starts and ends, the perils of belief and trusting old men with agendas and the horror at helping to kindle a spark of belief in a cynic.</p>
<p>(Written for the prompt druxy: something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Druxy

It starts and ends with an apple.  
  
It starts with a girl that learned the truth of apples and what was within them, all the names they gave to every miracle ever to exist, the way they held them aloft and the stories and religions and myths that formed around them. It starts with a girl who wants to devour all knowledge she can get her hands on.  
  
It ends with her frozen, Desmond advancing on her, Desmond saying no, golden light. It ends with her soft punched out gasp as the blade punctures her flesh – if Desmond knows where to aim from the Animus, whatever controls him knows even better. The First Civilisation built them to be strong, built them to survive. They built them.  
  
If you build something, you can take it apart.  
  
And it's weird, all the ways she thought of dying – and she did, she turned them over and over and over in her mind as she listened to Desmond screaming the same way Sixteen ( _Clay, his name was Clay, his name was Clay and you were complicit in his death_ ) did – she didn't actually picture it like this. She never thought it would be Desmond doing it. Desmond who smiled at her and wanted to please her, who joked and laughed and checked in on her. Maybe it's because he knew her better, because she'd saved his life (as far as he knew) and she'd been as much a prisoner as him (a prisoner of her own making and that's when it starts to blur, as if she weren't already squinting at shades of grey everyone else insisted were different when all she could think of was the absurdity of arguing over details when the big picture was about to fall down on top of them) or maybe it's because under his armour, he's a good guy. Lucy gets that they all have their coping mechanisms. Rebecca is larger than life, Shaun is stuffy and she's uptight whereas Desmond makes bad jokes and uses them like a shield.  
  
It's not as if she can't see the daddy issues a mile away.  
  
It's not as if she doesn't have those same fractures running through her, courtesy of the same mentor.  
  
The thing is though that Desmond is genuine in a way Lucy can't ever remember being. Maybe it's because she knew what she was up against, lived and breathed it, immersed herself in it, the girl who wanted to unravel the mysteries and save the day. Her belief when she was approached was bright enough, hot enough, fervent enough that it let someone else believe in her and hadn't she felt so powerful then? Her out in the world, her infiltrating their enemies, Lucy Stillman, one girl of many (even as small as their order was – smaller now, smaller every day and yes, she's been complicit in that too in some way) playing their enemy for fools, right under their nose.  
  
But things burn out.  
  
And she tried. She tried so damn hard she's amazed she managed to keep going, that there was anything left to fashion this new skin around herself, to pick up the broken burning pieces of the girl she was – and that was the first time she'd thought of herself as a girl in years because only a girl would let herself fall for something like that, only a girl could ever be so proud she didn't see the fall until she wondered why she was a heap on the ground with blood in her mouth and tears she was too shocked to wipe away – to make a woman out of it. She could have let it end and none of them would have blamed her. She would have been remembered, perhaps a cautionary tale but a good one, not whatever she'll be now. A sour note. A flinch. A name you can't say whilst maintaining eye contact. She could have let it end the way Clay did in the end. She could have upset them more. A hundred ways to make mistakes that would have seen her fired.  
  
Instead she found someone who dusted her off. Someone with a sense of purpose in every movement who spoke in a way she'd found sophisticated then (pretentious, old men and empty words and arguing semantics and hiding behind language instead of facing the truth) and who believed in her. She'd had nothing. She'd been nothing. Lost abandoned dead girl walking. What happens when you're between a rock and a hard place and someone offers you a hand? Human nature, some old base instinct, some quick burst of chemicals – all it translates to is the impulse to reach out and take that hand, to let it drag you up, to let something else fill you up. Sometimes you don't need sustenance of the body. It's your mind and your soul that need something.  
  
She'd always wanted to believe and to know so badly.  
  
Besides, what did it matter? They were already dying. She's an Assassin. _Was_ an Assassin. Once you're marked for death, that never goes away, it's always there, it's sitting on your shoulder, it's behind your eyes, it's on the tip of your tongue, it's what wraps around your mind every time you go to sleep and dream about all the ways it's going to end. A gun to the back of the head. The impact of a body when it hits the ground after a fall. A handful of pills the company you're bound to oh-so-helpfully manufactures. A friend and brother you betrayed and sentenced to madness taking it out on you.  
  
Instead it's the one that doesn't know.  
  
Instead it's the one she was meant to deliver.  
  
In many ways, it's a relief.  
  
When you want to believe so badly, when you are empty and hungry and hollow, when you are bitter tears in the dark wishing someone would come help you and remember that you're not a soldier, that you're a girl that's lost and alone in a strange land of unfriendly faces then you cling tight to what you're given. Desmond would never agree with her about how Warren Vidic can be charming and warm, witty and brilliant. Desmond sees a monster and not a man, sees someone mad and without any sort of care for interests outside his own. Desmond sees a man who could have him killed and tossed aside, lamb to the slaughter. Desmond is angry and glows with it, curled fists and red cheeks – she never would have answered back like he does, like he doesn't know how to back down even if he wants to, Desmond who can push the limits each and every time. Desmond isn't afraid like she is.  
  
He's afraid now. He believes now. She did that. She had to give him the proud smile, the warm embrace, her head on his shoulder when he smiled shyly and said he wanted to do this and her relief had been manufactured because it had been a one-two hit to her stomach and she'd wanted to tell him to run, to run where they won't find you, don't let this destroy you, don't let this burn you out.  
  
She's a good actress.  
  
No, she's a good muse. A muse to all that's to come, to the death and destruction that drove Clay mad, the chaotic entropy of the past colliding, the same mistakes again and again, the same war fought by the same factions. Desmond thinks she's going to be his salvation and his new mentor, that she's going to guide him to the good end where he gets to be the hero (not that he believes the hero part, it's Desmond, he'll believe in everything but himself first and she thinks of Bill and some of that old fire comes back even as she pretends to be civil and still the same girl he sent away seven years ago in the emails Desmond doesn't know about) and they can all look at each other in disbelief and be amazed that they did it. She doubts he's ever read Homer. She doubts he knows about other apples that aren't those out of Eden but even then, the name they gave them – one Apple and two people were cast out of paradise, made to toil, made to know pain and suffering, made to watch one child kill another. Knowledge and from that springs discord.  
  
She feels like an apple. She feels rotten and full of maggots, press too hard and she'll bruise and bleed. But outside she's still bright and fresh and shiny, good as new. That's what Desmond sees. She doesn't let him see any further, doesn't want to taint him like that.  
  
It ends with his blade punching through her flesh, his wide horrified eyes. It ends with his hand touching her, her blood hot on his wrist and fingers.


End file.
